The use of video has become increasingly popular in a variety of applications given the continued advancement in video sensor and data storage technologies. For example, video is increasingly relied upon in law enforcement, security, medical, and commercial contexts. With this increased reliance on video has come the need to annotate and index videos to make them more helpful to users, and to more readily exchange important information pertaining to a video between different users.
Various multimedia applications are generally available on the Web that allow media content to be associated with videos. By way of example, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) based language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things. SMIL allows the representation of media items such as text, images, video, audio, and links to other SMIL presentations, and files from multiple Web servers. SMIL may also be used to create a spatial layout and timeline for entities that are displayed, although there is no interaction between the entities on the screen.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,454,763 discloses an approach to link page content with a media file and display these links during playback of the media file. This approach links notes stored in an electronic document with media, such as video stored in a video file. As media is played back from the media file, visual indicators are displayed adjacent to or over page content so that a user can see how page content relates to the media file. Page content can be highlighted when the page content has a relationship with the media that is being played. That is, page content can be highlighted at different times as the recorded information from a video file is being played back in a video display window.
Tracking of external media content may be particularly important with respect to georeferenced videos, with which there is generally associated geospatial metadata providing position information for pixels within the video. One particularly advantageous system that may be used for processing of geospatial video is the Full-Motion Video Asset Management Engine (FAME™) from the present Assignee Harris Corporation. The FAME™ system speeds the process of analyzing a wide range of intelligence information. For geospatial analysis, the FAME™ system has a mapping interface that provides a visual display for the sensor track and location of frames of video from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or other source. This tool allows indexing, search, retrieval, and sensor tracking in real time during play out. Further exploitation of geospatial metadata is done by extracting embedded Key-Link-Value (KLV) metadata from the video stream.
Despite the advantages of such approaches, further functionality may be desirable for processing and displaying videos and associated media content in certain applications.